Abstract

How can we capture the ideology of a political party? How do we know what a party stands for? This chapter deals with another classic measurement conundrum: How do we reconstruct the identity of social science actors (i.e., a political party) based on their discourse? For decades, political scientists have struggled with the question of how to decipher the ideology of political parties. Most existing studies have used a variety of different approaches and sometimes contradictory strategies to delineate who belongs to a party family. These strategies have tried to assess party membership based on (i) how the parties define themselves, (ii) how experts perceive them, or (iii) applying empirical and transparent criteria that could be used to determine who does and who does not belong to a particular party family.